Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government is doing a roaring trade in what could reasonably be seen as trivialities: buck-a-beer, booze in corner stores, legalized tailgate parties. Easier access to vice gets major billing in Finance Minister Vic Fedeli’s first budget, released Thursday: More pages are devoted to drinking and gambling than to lowering energy bills.

Ford is the third-least popular premier in Canada, Angus Reid found last month: His 38-per-cent approval rating is worse even than Rachel Notley’s, and in vastly better economic circumstances. Among the other 62 per cent are many convinced all this these trinkets will distract people from what they believe is an unfolding disaster: the Tories’ promised $6,000 maximum childcare tax credit, delivered in the budget, will shunt kids into unlicensed and potentially dangerous daycares, they cry; the $28.5 billion Toronto transit plan unveiled Wednesday — with at least $11 billion to be shouldered by Queen’s Park — is a recipe for endless waste, delay and failure, they fret; the blind rush to return to balanced budgets, they moan, will mean savage education cuts, beggared universities, two-tier healthcare and lord knows what other horrors.

In point of fact, however, fiscal conservatives will not be thrilled by this budget. Whereas the Liberals’ 2018-19 spendathon projected $163.5 billion in total spending for 2019-20, Fedeli’s document projects … $163.4 billion. It foresees returning to balance only a year earlier than the Liberals did, in 2023-24, while increasing annual total spending at almost exactly the rate the Liberals had proposed.

In point of fact, however, fiscal conservatives will not be thrilled by this budget

And naturally, the doomsayers will not be mollified, either. “We went into this budget expecting deep cuts,” NDP leader Andrea Horwath told reporters. “What we didn’t expect was the level of irresponsibility and outright cruelty.” Pro-Ford or anti-, no one is genuinely distracted by the shiny, boozy baubles except those who want to be distracted: Urban sophisticates love to sneer at things like cheap beer and tailgate parties, but they have plenty of time left to deplore everything else Ford says and does. Ironically, though, Ford’s “treating adults like adults” agenda might eventually end up more popular among urban sophisticates than with a fair chunk of his own party.

A common question in recent days among urban types was, “Why just tailgating? Why not a bottle of wine with a picnic?” The budget answers with a measure allowing municipalities to allow drinking in designated parks and other public areas. Toronto City Council recently passed a brunch-oriented motion asking the province to allow weekend drinking in restaurants as of 9 a.m. The budget says yes, and then some: 9 a.m. opening time seven days a week, and the suggestion of further liberalization to come. (Don’t put it past city councillors to reconsider it now.) Bars and restaurants will actually be able to advertise “happy hour,” instead of Temperance League-approved euphemisms.

Fancy a wager? The government plans to open up the market for legal online gambling, and devotes an entire page to quotes from pro sports commissioners arguing for single-event sports betting. (The feds would have to agree to that.) It promises expanded casino operations in Chatham, Innisfil and Rexdale, and new ones in Peterborough and Pickering. In Ford’s future Ontario, you’ll be able to buy lottery tickets on your phone.

These aren’t especially conservative measures, but they are quintessentially Ford-ian. Doug Ford likes football, tailgate parties and casinos — and not the clinical, line-up-for-a-beer kind of casinos. Doug Ford also thinks, however inconsistently, that government should stay the heck out of people’s business: If they want to have a morning tipple, ain’t no one else’s concern.

Unlike many novel and ambitious things Ford might do in government, it’s easy to imagine changes like these lasting: No future premier is likely to remove beer and wine from corner stores or ratchet down the fun level in casinos — especially if they lead to more government revenues, which is likely. Ford’s haters would consider that a laughable legacy.

But I’ve long thought there could be more than superficial benefits to extracting the rod that’s been stuck up this province’s backside its whole life — this at-times hysterical aversion to change that sees a tailgate party as prologue to anarchy, and envisions hordes of drunken toddlers staggering out of the province’s convenience stores; this belief that doing things the way lots of other places all over the world do them won’t just not work here, but will lead to disaster.

That monster has many tentacles — from the preternaturally smelly Beer Store, which wouldn’t exist but for the far-too-cozy relationship between politicians and big business down the generations, to reinvent-the-wheel exercises like eHealth and the Presto smart card, whose only added value relative to vastly superior off-the-peg solutions went to well-connected consultants; from the province’s hopelessly outdated and inefficient courts system to the terrified busybodies at Toronto City Hall who stand resolutely athwart everything from laneway housing to food carts, patio licenses and too many restaurants opening in vacant storefronts.

I’m not suggesting beer in corner stores will start a revolution demanding smaller, better government that trusts people at least half as much as it trusts itself. That would probably be a bit silly. But I’m not not suggesting it, either.

Bill Buford spoke about moving to Lyon with his family for a year to write Dirt, and then staying five, about their lives now in New York, and the future ...

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